Good Grief

“Telling the stories of recently extinct species is a way of capturing people’s imaginations to this end,” said Pearl. “It’s not science or statistics, it’s history, it’s real life – and in an age of cultural amnesia, storytelling inspired by historical events is a way to learn lessons from the past.”

The Guardian is not my favorite media source, but sometimes, they publish something that makes you wonder what the hell they’re thinking the rest of the time. In my couple posts on this blog, so far, I think I have at least peripherally addressed grief a couple of times. When you write a doomer blog, it is an essential aspect of everything you do. As I told a friend the other day, “I don’t get a free ride from despondency, and I have my bad days, but if you realize that the reason for your despondency is that you cherish life, then that becomes your entire goal: CHERISH LIFE.”

Grief is, indeed, cathartic. We have grief because it is a critical aspect of who we are, why we have survived and evolved. We have to have it, and our civilization — like with so many other things — tries to remove us from it. It is, after all, extremely inconvenient for people to grieve for the species they are employed to kill.

Here is my question: After we, too, have passed, who will tell the stories, myths and scary stories about us? Who will have us lurking in the forest, or coming from the ground, or the water? I fear there will be no lessons, just our debris. I grieve this, too.